Tom Wolfe’s giddy new
Back to Blood is as excessive as the city it celebrates and eviscerates. The satire lands
on obvious Miami targets: the rich, the shallow, the felonious, the status seekers and the zealots
of every stripe.

It will offend sensibilities all around, but the novel’s pointed observations are dangerously
close to reality: Wolfe has done his homework and done it well.

Plenty of outsiders have tried to capture the spectacle that is Miami, and some, such as Joan
Didion (Miami), have succeeded to an extent.

But nobody has ever conveyed the intricacies of the city and its roiling cultural cauldron with
such breathless, gaudy literary acrobatics as Wolfe does in
Back to Blood, so named for the tribal lines along which our loyalties lie.

In the same way he excavated the secrets and lies of New York in
The Bonfire of the Vanities and Atlanta in
A Man in Full, the canny and indefatigable author pounded the pavement from South Beach to
Hialeah, returned to his desk in tune to the erratic pulse of Miami and documented its excesses
with lurid, unrestrained energy.

Back to Blood is pervasively flamboyant, a passionate argument against (or maybe for) the
bloodlessness of preening postmodernism. But flamboyance is Miami’s native tongue.

This is a book that yells, screams and, sometimes, makes you long for peace and quiet, but you
won’t be able to ignore it — especially if you live in the city.

“(I)f you really want to understand Miami,” one character says, “you got to realize one thing
first of all. In Miami, everybody hates everybody.”

Sometimes, we even hate our own.

A wide array of characters courses through
Back to Blood — among them a sex-addiction therapist; his young Cuban-American nurse,
desperate to leave Hialeah for a more exotic existence on South Beach; a Russian oligarch who might
have stocked a new art museum named after him with forgeries; and a billionaire with a sexually
transmitted disease. But the novel’s primary focus is Officer Nestor Camacho.

Nestor wants only to flaunt his impressive physique; bed his girlfriend, Magdalena; and earn the
admiration of his superiors. Instead, he keeps inadvertently inflaming the city’s ethnic factions,
most significantly his own.

Yet
Back to Blood has plenty of moments of comedy, including scenes at an assisted-living
facility where the clatter of aluminum walkers on pavement signals the race is on for lemon
meringue pie.

Back to Blood is less about character than it is about chaos, and its plot tends to wander
from one extreme event to the next. The book is wild, and its characters larger than life.